Crafting Alts

Daemons_Bane

How do you build them? I have never really felt like doing it before, but I figured that I wanted to give it a try

What I noticed is that I get the exact same amount of gold from low and max level alike.. So do you just keep them at basic crafting skill levels? Farming almost 100 skillpoints do take some time after all

What about Writs? Are the chances of getting master writs higher, if the items I deliver are max level?

VaranisArano

You have to do max level writs in order to receive Master Writs. Also, you get better rewards, unless you want lower level recipes from Provisioning.

joerginger

In the beginning I usually played them like I played my main before, only a bit more efficient. That means I played the tutorial if the character started in a new chapter region. Then I would try to get to the character's alliance capital to be approached by the "Hooded Figure" thus and start the main quest. The reaon for this is that the quests give good experience, and even more important: you get a skill point for completion of each mission. If your main has already collected a good amount of CP, you might be able to do several main quest missions, I was usually content after four or so. I guess at that time the character was at least at the level required to start crafting certifications. How you do that is up to you, I usually went back to the alliance capital again and went through the short quests. You could also just deconstruct some items your main character put in the bank - or you buy items to deconstruct. Eventually I would send the character to Alinor in Summerset to certify jewelry crafting.

Being in a large guild is very helpful when you start a new character because you can teleport to other guild members, which helps a lot in making regions accessible and it saves you a lot of time you would be spending riding around incredibly slowly. Unfortunately level 10 is no longer one of the most important milestones, because until Monday you would then press L and send your character to Cyrodiil to do the tutorial there, get the alliance war skill lines accompanied by two skill points and could start leveling the Rapid Maneuver skill.
I would then try to keep leveling the character relatively fast up to level 15 when bar swapping becomes possible. The reason for this is simply that even though the character will not see much action, it will definitely have to do some fighting. In addition, I try to make my characters interesting in the sense that I have a variety of different races, professions and playstyles among them.

Another reason why the character has to be able to do some fighting is the wish to have some skill points when the crafting skill lines level up. For this reason a character usually runs (or now crawls) around Tamrial a lot in the beginning to pick up skyshards and perhaps public dungeons. You can also do real dungeons, but I found suffering the Undaunted skill line once on my main enough and only send my alts out very very occasionally, usually only once to the easy dungeons when they're on a pledge - once again, just for the skill point
As you already found out, the gold you get has nothing to do with your crafting level, it is connected to you character level instead.

For your last question: I'm sure master writs only drop when you're at the highest level of the respective crafting branch.

As I recently read in a post by @tmbrinks , the provisioning tree is slightly different in the respect that it is not a bad idea to leave your alts at lower provisioning levels - at least if like me you want to collect as many recipes as possible for your main character. You won't get provioning master writs, but they're not giving lots of vouchers. They don't seem to drop as frequently as e.g. alchemy or enchanting mastwer writs.

Sorry for the long text, but hopefully it'll help a little bit.

Gythral

Do main quest and then get skyshards (and anything else that you want that nets skillpoints),
as you want as many skillpoints in the crafts as possible to get as many as possible master wirts

And choose the crafts you want, provisioning, alchemy and jewelry are poorer choices, in number of the reward or cost of completing!

tmbrinks

Daemons_Bane wrote: »

How do you build them? I have never really felt like doing it before, but I figured that I wanted to give it a try

What I noticed is that I get the exact same amount of gold from low and max level alike.. So do you just keep them at basic crafting skill levels? Farming almost 100 skillpoints do take some time after all

What about Writs? Are the chances of getting master writs higher, if the items I deliver are max level?

Do your writs at max level (other than possibly provisioning)

The main profit in daily writs is from the gold improvement materials that drop.

At base level you have about a 3% chance (1 in 30-40) of getting one. At max level, you have about a 30% chance of getting them. So you'll get 10x as many improvement materials. For Jewelry, you get a guaranteed grain with even daily writ, sometimes you get 2, and rarely a full plating!

For a month, the average profit per character at max level is currently about 586k per character per month. At lowest level, it's reduced to 285k, a loss of 300k profit per month, more than half!

Are writs still good to do at low levels... YES!... but they are BETTER to do at max level.

All the information is in the spreadsheet link in my signature.

As far as "building them". Many of my characters are only built for writs. You only need 10-15 Skill points above the ones you get from leveling up your character, so you just get a few skyshards early on, respec after to take out skills and put them in to the crafting. You DON'T need the passives for chef/brewer/medicinal use/chemistry etc... as you can make all potions/food on another character and keep in your bank.

bmnoble

You need about 69(you get 64 or so just from getting to level 50, collect the skyshards from the starter islands and your done) skill points for a purely writ crafting alt if you plan to do the crafts at max level and have the hireling passives maxed out.

Level your alts to 50 to max the amount of gold you get from the daily writ turn ins.

As your leveling them decon everything you pick up, gear/weapons/jewelry/glyphs every bit helps. If you have high enough CP make sure to assign points so you get the 10% inspiration boost from deconing stuff.


I will be as blunt as I can possibly be making as much gold as is possible from writs is not something that will be finished setting up in a few days, weeks or even months, it will take as long as it takes everyone has a different amount of time and not everyone is willing to set up 18 characters to do writs to make them gold.

However once its set up, once you have all 18 of those characters to the CP level, all their crafts maxed out, all the alchemy and rune traits/words learnt(that maxes out the drop rate chance for enchanting and alchemy master writs), so long as you do your writs daily you will eventually reach a point where you will have more gold than you know what to do with. (assuming you don't fall in the black hole of housing, then you will forever be short on gold or at least it will feel like it)


Best thing I can recommend to start out is:

All your character slots you have not used, nows the time to use your creativity and design characters you will want to use someday(the amount of effort that goes into a dedicated writ crafting alt is not something you want to just throw away and delete one day)

Create as many characters as you have free slots, level them all to level 6, learn all the equipment certifications for daily writs, on your main buy a large quantity of the, basic mats you need, Iron/maple/low level cloth mats/Pewter ounce etc have about 4000 of each mat sitting in your craft bag. Install lazy writ crafter

Make sure you have the crafting passives unlocked on at least you main character though, and every wayshrine your able to access discovered on that character, along with the lost treasure and map pins add ons installed.

Now do the equipment writs every day on your alts build up surveys, end of each week collect those surveys on your main, sell the raw mats either in zone or through a guild trader. Bank the gold your daily writs give you at the end of each week to save time from depositing a small amount each day.

While you keep that up level one of your characters at a time when you have time doing whatever you like, dolmens will drive you insane, make sure to do the writs in somewhere like Vivec with easy access to a stablemaster to train your alts riding skills each day.

I am not going to go into detail about how to level a character there are enough guides on how to do that efficiently if you desire to do that. (Don't be afraid to respec/assign different active skills to your bar and level as many skill lines as possible to make the character useful in the future to many people make the mistake of only having a few skills they keep on one bar for the entire level grinding process, level the skill lines now while you have to level anyway)


You may find you make enough gold for your needs just doing the bare min with the surveys but the main thing is once everything is set up its done finished you only need to buy mats to keep fueling your writs to make your gold eventually you will be able to ignore the surveys as well if you feel like it.

I will give you an example based on my own set up:

With 18 characters maxed out in all the crafts:

4648 gold per character per day = 83664 gold just from turning in the writs = 585648 gold per week(think of that as your budget rather than pure profit you will have to spend some of that to keep your writ crafters supplied)

I just sell the gold upgrade mats I get each week, the purple/blue/green platings, alchemy/enchanting master writs in large numbers other master writs on occasion, jewerly intricate's, the occasional recipe, raw mats from my hirelings and that is it.

I make the better part of 1M - to nearing 2M mark most in sales weeks from those after tax not before it, they all come from my daily writs no farming for sets or mats. I pay 50K a week across 5 trade guilds(10K each) as dues then any taxes from sales I make.

None of that includes the gold I could make if I did my surveys as well, I have about 150 of each of the refinable mat type surveys sitting on an alt and another 500 of each of the alchemy and enchanting ones on a different alt to free up bank space.

You might ask why don't I do those surveys and get all that gold as well? Simple answer is I don't need to and really just don't want to. Why don't I need to? I have about 18 million in gold sitting in my bank, why should I put in more than an hour/maybe an hour and a half at most a day to make my gold, I already have more than I personally need.

At the moment I am putting in the least effort that my set up allows and making a decent amount of gold each week, I did all that so I don't have to put in too much effort to make my gold.

If I felt like it I could just ignore my writs for the next year or two, in fact I did from November last year till the jubilee event and the I ignored them again till the middle of July when I started doing them again daily.(I would have a lot more gold in the bank if I kept up my writs instead of having a break but it would make no difference once you have more than you need its just a large number and I enjoyed the break so who cares)


I am half awake while I have been writing all this, its all off the top of my head, if it helps it helps, whatever you end up doing don't stress too much at the end of the day its pretend money, if your going to kill yourself trying to get rich do it in real life.

Just take your time you will eventually have more gold than you need.

That's about all I can think of good night.

Pevey

So the only thing I would add to the very good answers above is: Why have one account of 18 crafters if you can have... TWO accounts of 18 crafters. If you install 2 copies of the game, you can do writs on double the number of toons in much less than double the amount of time because you use time otherwise spent on load screens.

The investment to do this—in time, gold, and other resources—is absolutely enormous. It’s not for everyone. But if you do it, you will be swimming in gold, much more than you could ever need even with housing stuff.

I combine my daily writ time cycling through toons with a very short farming routine. For instance, going to the crafting hall in murkmire because I still lack a few plans, or those little houses in western Skyrim. Usually at least one or two out of 36 will pull something really nice that is my reward for the effort.

This play style is absolutely not for everyone. But it is fun for operationally minded people who like continuously finding ways to improve their methods and efficiency.

As a side note, for anyone wanting to try two accounts at the same time, there are some caveats. First, zos has said this is okay if the second account is idle or waiting on load screen or such, but certain things you could do with 2 accounts logged in might be considered an exploit. And second, you really should install 2 copies of the game. You don’t have to. You can just go in the folder and launch another copy. But as you log in and out you get oddities with you addons that track things like research because two processes trying time read and write to the same files.

Nestor

The cheapest way to level an Alt is to farm zombies or undead on your CP160 plus character, gather the gear and let the Alts decon it. Including the Glyphs. Just put the stuff in the bank, your alt can decon without withdrawing it.

PizzaCat82

Daemons_Bane wrote: »

How do you build them? I have never really felt like doing it before, but I figured that I wanted to give it a try

What I noticed is that I get the exact same amount of gold from low and max level alike.. So do you just keep them at basic crafting skill levels? Farming almost 100 skillpoints do take some time after all

What about Writs? Are the chances of getting master writs higher, if the items I deliver are max level?

Ok once you have 1 maxed crafter.

You give everything you find to the next crafter to deconstruct. You also start researching traits on all your alts, not just the main or second character. Get their carry capacity up as well.

Seond all your junk that's not worth selling to the alts. one by one, to decon. Soon they'll be level 50 in everything. But that wont let them do top level dailies.

You have to go on a skyshard run with every one of them. Get to lvl 10 in at least one skill. Then the next. Then get the research passives. At the end, if you want to spend the time, giving them the Hireling passives are totally worth it in the long run. Dont spend money on extraction for alts. Or Keen eye. Or Resin/Temp/Wax Experitise.. your main crafter should be the only one extracting and getting mats.

doggie

These crafting alts is what I hate about the resource economy in ESO. It's ruining the prices for the guys who gather mats by hand. In my opinion all resources should be based on adventure, like picking up stuff in the world, or doing a dungeon /delve etc.

Would make it more fun to play the game, prices would be better. Today there is no real way of directly gold your gear by doing dungeons only. You have to sell the junk and purchase tempers, or wait for them to be mailed to you from hirelings or your wirts, sigh, or ofcourse refine mats.

it would be much better if you had a chance to get a gold temper from the last boss in a dungeon for example, and then drop the tempers from writs/hirelings.

etchedpixels

I've been taking a slightly different approach. I've got alts but I've been levelling them up both for crafting and for game purposes. It's a good way to explore different classes and builds as well as differing ways to play and approach the game world - or in some cases even play questlines properly. Tis a bit hard to do the thieves guild story as a Nord tank !

tmbrinks

doggie wrote: »

These crafting alts is what I hate about the resource economy in ESO. It's ruining the prices for the guys who gather mats by hand. In my opinion all resources should be based on adventure, like picking up stuff in the world, or doing a dungeon /delve etc.

Would make it more fun to play the game, prices would be better. Today there is no real way of directly gold your gear by doing dungeons only. You have to sell the junk and purchase tempers, or wait for them to be mailed to you from hirelings or your wirts, sigh, or ofcourse refine mats.

it would be much better if you had a chance to get a gold temper from the last boss in a dungeon for example, and then drop the tempers from writs/hirelings.

hasn't there been a 20-25% increase in the cost of gold mats over the last 2 months There's still plenty of profit in farming!

it's at least true on PC/NA, don't know about other servers/platforms

Daemons_Bane

So basically.. If I am in it for the rewards/mats, level them up to 50 and get cracking.. If I am only in it for gold, get them to work at level 10 and cash in.. the gold reward don't change, so it's tempting

tmbrinks

Daemons_Bane wrote: »

So basically.. If I am in it for the rewards/mats, level them up to 50 and get cracking.. If I am only in it for gold, get them to work at level 10 and cash in.. the gold reward don't change, so it's tempting

You can sell the items that you get.

You will make gold either way, but you'll make more than twice as much (if you sell) doing them at max level.

zaria

I don't have crafting alts, I have crafting mains, has 4 caracters now I have played so much they has so many skill points I can add crafting on top, 4rt lost her PvP build but is doing Elsweyr quests with her who will make up for it.

On the other hand I have 4 characters who are glorified bank alts. That is they are level 50 has some gear mostly hand me down stuff but I don't play them, I could always make crafting alts of them.
Be sure to put them in legerdemain civilian clothing so I don't take them into an dungeon by accident

That they have researched all the traits including nirnhomed and jewelry makes it more interesting.

On the other hand alts without any crafting skills are nice to generate surveys, got ton during the anniversary event, however its probably better to just buy ancestor silk, its the one I'm low on, a bit short on platinum but doing surveys today helped.

Now I don't get the issue about rapid and crafting alts, my main has all the skyshards so she does all the surveys.
Its also smart to stack them on one character as you will get duplicates and some are at award places its just as well to wait until you have an stack, in short crafting alts don't need an fast horse, swift jewelry makes more sense its not like they will ride anywhere.
Main also do all the master writs I do.
(For some who never do group content, they I feel sorry for because of the change)

Daemons_Bane

tmbrinks wrote: »

Daemons_Bane wrote: »

So basically.. If I am in it for the rewards/mats, level them up to 50 and get cracking.. If I am only in it for gold, get them to work at level 10 and cash in.. the gold reward don't change, so it's tempting

You can sell the items that you get.

You will make gold either way, but you'll make more than twice as much (if you sell) doing them at max level.

I know, but I was referring solely to the quest reward cash

Cirantille

11 alts -

7 of them have skills at 50

5 of them almost 8 trait crafter

And for others still working on shard collecting and researching

Benefit is that, I noticed gold mat drop rate is better when your skill level is higher
And the more traits you know, the more likely to drop master writs